It's not surprising to me that people cheat or don't see cheating as bad. Cheaters literally do prosper. Like in college applications, you can absolutely write

It's not surprising to me that people cheat or don't see cheating as bad. Cheaters literally do prosper. Like in college applications, you can absolutely write lies. Nobody's going to check if you were captain of the track team. Nobody's going to fact check your essay about how you came out as gay[1]. Even the people who don't cheat understand how to stretch and bend the truth. You take a minor event and turn it into a whole college essay. You take a side project and turn it into a supposed startup. Hackathons are competitions for who can lie the best and claim their flashy front end will change the world. There was a period where the same project won hackathon after hackathon. And sure, hackathons are not exactly a big deal. But if you're cheating at a hackathon, why not cheat at a job interview? So much of what we teach in school these days is how to play the game, how to appear more impressive than you are, how to trick people into believing you're smarter than other people. [1]: Both of these are first-hand experiences, i.e. I knew the people who did them